can we get it together?
always running, always returning
send me a message if you're interested.
That Friday afternoon I fell asleep to the sound of rain, soaking the ground, melting the snow.
I dreamed. Stumbling alone across bloodsoaked trails, through the first snows of winter, through the dying gasps of autumn, of friendship, of love, I dreamed. Haunted? Perhaps, though these three years it's often felt more as though I've returned to that barren, forsaken plain than it to me. To the tired, lonely, the despairing of spring, that bleak sky calls: to rest, to death. Dying, sleeping, I dreamed.
I awake on a bed of marble, on cliffs of ivory, above shining seas of glass.
I am alone.
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look, contribution!
by the way, if you've only heard of Jorge Luis Borges in context of a high-school "spanish culture" lesson, you really check him out. it's well worth your while, i promise -- especially if the measure of "your while" can be taken from the five minutes you just spent reading this brainshit.
I've noticed that the English language does not seem to have an adjective describing a person who has to go to the bathroom.
By far, the best politician--no, statesman--this country currently has and has had in a while, Democrat or Republican. May God bless Barack Obama.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
Three Rivers Press © 2004 by Barack Obama
ISBN: 1-4000-8277-3 Available for purchase at Amazon.com
Excerpt
Preface to the 2004 Edition
Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review . In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book's publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.
I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.
A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review . Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.
Eventually my guilt for threadjacking Vlad's post outweighed my dislike of multiple newsposts, so I decided to delete my completely unrelated comment and post it below.
In other news, SuprNova.org is apparently "down for the count" according to Penny Arcade, a bit of information which is more immediately distressing although possibly less relevant in a big-picture sort of worldview -- which, incidentally, we in the United States frown upon when we are bothered to consider it.
I haven't been able to find any reports confirming Penny Arcade's analysis, but here's a copy of Retspan's (a French antipiracy organization) initial press release about the then-impending lawsuit, and what SuprNova admin Sloncek had to say about it at the time.
SuprNova.org, for those of you who didn't know, was a sort of clearinghouse for BitTorrent trackers of pirated movies, applications, and music. I hear it also had a few legitimate uses, though I have no first-hand experience with those.
Just thought I'd compress the news threads into as few posts as possible. [Edit: Obviously, didn't work out.] Go read some of Nathan's imitation Japanese poetry, the rest of you. Incidentally, some thoughts on the appropriate English translation of the Japanese form. I remember reading a much better analysis of the same subject a few weeks ago, but Google isn't giving me anything.
God, I just finished downloading two files using SuprNova trackers today. I can't help but imagine that this is what it feels like to have a conversation with a friend not suspecting in the least that just the next hour he will temporarily inhabit the same strip of pavement as an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.